Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1887-04-03
AN AMERICAN BEAUTY.
Miss Howes Not of the Weird or
Stylish Kind.

Stylish Kind.
American women are the fashion
abroad. They are said to nave more
esprit than the femininity OF the 'etfete
monarchies," save perhaps, married
Frenchwoman. whose esprit Is generally
too much of the caviare flavor. we are
! constantly furnishing charming women
| to the other side. Our specimen beauties
are sent across on appreciation. Have
not all our fair women received dlplom as
abroad. Miss Langdon, Miss Grant, Mrs.
| Potter, the CAROLS, OF Carrollton, ana
| half a hundred otners2 And now Mlss
Maud Howe, who has just married Mr..
| Elliot, the artist, has lett us for foreign
shore. This is not her first visit; her rep
utation for beauty 1s transatlantic. Years
ago she electrified the very Rome toward
| which she now travels by ner wit ana ner
! loneliness, and since then her portrait,
| with vy-bound head and classlcallv per-
! feet line of profile, has been exhibited at
| the Paris Salon.
Among the ranks of charming Ameri-
can women, Miss Howe, or, one should
say, Mrs. Elliot, takes a foremost place.
When at her christening the fairies came
| to give their gifts, none were forgotten.
That soured old dame, who the Queen, in
a stupid way, not entirely confined to
| Queens, always overlooked, received
card with the others and gave as pretty
present as any. Probably Miss Howe
has come nearer realizing her ideal than
any woman OF her day, provided her ideal
is that of most women. In the first place
she is beautiful-the great requisite alike
Tor the heroine of fairy tale and meta
| physical Omance-beautItul III the real,
old-fashIoned, honest style, which has
| somewhat gone out of date. The French
reallsts, the arbiters of literary fashion,
| don't make their heroines beautiful any
more. That is commonplace, they say.
| Instead they have them changeful eyed
and "swift and white and half perverse,"
with sudden, serpentine movements and
an exciting ferocity of disposition. What
with our passion-tassed French cousins
and our Ducolic English sisters, all run
to size, the duty OF preserving the old
| types OF loneliness falls on US. We
should have special preserves for 1t, as
we have for the buffaloes in the Yellow
stone Park, and as they do for salmon at
| Tadousac. Miss Howe's beauty is not of
this weird and what one might call
stylish" kind; it is the genuine, una
dulterated article. There is picture OF
her in the Corcoran Gallery at Washing
ton, painted by Porter sin his salad
days.' In this we see lovely, fresh,
healthy girl, perhaps too pretty, wee bit
suggestive, in her smiling perfection. OF
|
of handkerchief boxes, but for all that
wonderfully lovely creature, with fine,
feathery, bronze hair and eyes as brown
and deep as the pools in trout stream.
Since this picture was painted years
have passed and both artist and sitter
have changed. The allurements of white
and gold studies, of tone pictures, have
seduced Mr.. Porter from the straight
and narrow path which follows nature,
! 6laprtQ6
garbs OF fashion for the picturesque.
This was alter she had begun to write.
With the first plunge into literature there
arises in all women the taste tor pic
turesque style of dress. Mrs. Frances
Hodg son Burnett has strong warnings In
this direction. She affects white crepe
tea gowns, which fall in lines OF classic
purity, flowing wrappers of dull shades,
with trimmings of fur, and long plush
wraps of pale tints, with bloom on
them, delicate as the gray dust on grapes.
The picturesque in dress accumulated
Miss Howe's beauty. In long, straight
gown OF dull red, with puffs on the shout
ders and white tucker drawn up round
her throat. or in a white satin ball dress
with a classic wreath of Ivy leaves bound
round her curly hair, she might have
stepped from a canvas Of Sir Frederick
Leighton's.
Her writings are well known. They
are not great books, by any means, but
they have refinement without that milk
and water adulteration of which the
! female novelist lie 80 fond. Ladies as nov
elists are not, as a rule, triumphantly
| successful. They vacillate between two
extremes-the subtly suggestive, by very
young authors, as daring as they are
ignorant, which is generally rechauffe
of the modern French style, with Ouida-
esQue touches of local color, or else the
gently pastoral and bucOlic, by authors
as timorOus of overstepping the bounds
OF the proprieties as one OF Dickens hero
ines. Their muse sings the simple loves
of John and Mary; they revivify sweet
Auburn, lOveliest village of the plain !;
? they desire to be the Milletts OF literature,
but they generally are the Beyschlaqs.
Miss Howe has carefully avoided these
rocks and shoals. Her first book, 'The
/ Newport Aquarelle," is perhaps the best.
1t is well-told love story, with a flash
here and there of something that looks
ike genius and little slices OF modern
science alluringly sandwiched between
q love scene and a bit OF landscape paint
|. ing. There is a charming heroine who,
the gossips say, is the authoress, which
| is not improbable, as she is handsome,
clever and the proud recipient of some
TWENTY-FIVE offers OF marriage. This is
| doing WELL even for the heroine of novel.
|
} phenomenal case, and she had only
twenty-five. On dit, however, that II the
authoress did depict herself in the bril-
liant Gladys she has not exaggerated the
amount OF these matters OF the heart. 1t
IS said that once when Miss Howe had a
penchant for dogs each aspiring sutton
presented her with one. If the number
of these canine tributes OF affection was
stated in cold blood, 1t would be a fact
for contemporaneous history. Penelope,
at hundred suitors, 10 supposed to have
broken the record. But we haven't the
papers to prove this. We have only the
word of Homer, and we are not even sure
of that. 1t was Lewis Carroll who said
that be had given the matter much study
and had finally concluded that the ''Iliad''
and "Odyssey" were not written by
Homer, but by another man of the same
name. BETSY ODOwD.
IT'S real nice to be billiard expert
| George Slosson, who gave a series of instruc-